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Patricia Kennealy-Morrison - FAQ 47
One more time, and then you're never going to say it again... I have never believed for one NANOSECOND that Jim is still alive. I have never doubted, for the least gigafraction of an instant, the tiniest syllable of recorded time, that Jim is dead. If he were still alive, I would know it. It is as simple as that. No question. And though it breaks my heart yet again to say it, HE IS DEAD. I felt him go. I felt his absence, I feel it now, I know his presence coming to me from another place. There is no doubt. Ever. Forever. To me, people who think Jim faked his own death are every bit as repugnant as those evil morons who claim there never was a Holocaust are to Jews, as odious as those people who think we're into Satanism are to Witches. I find the thought so unspeakable that I will not even discuss it. And I don't want to hear another syllable of your asinine adolescent speculations or babbling half-witted rants. So just shut the hell up about it, okay??? And give him and me both some peace. Nor do I know when Jim's remains will be moved from PËre-Lachaise, though I pray to every god there is that his family will finally do something for him, the last best only thing they can do for him, to protect him now that he can no longer protect himself, and GET HIM OUT OF THERE AND CREMATE HIM AND SCATTER HIM OVER THE PACIFIC, THE WAY JIM HIMSELF ALWAYS WANTED IT!!!!! At least then he'll finally be safe from graverobbers (two attempts already made) and from the necrofannish hordes trashing his resting place. He deserves at least that, and I would go on my knees in broken glass to his family to beg them to give it to him, if I thought it would do any good. You all ask these things endlessly, but do you have any idea how painful these topics are for me to even think about, let alone talk or write about? Apparently not, or else you wouldn't keep on asking and prying and poking. Again, I AM NOT YOU. I feel very differently about all this than you do. It's not the same for me as it is for you. Jim is not the same for me as he is for you. To me Jim is not this ooooh-way-cool dead rockstar and isn't it fun to ask all these questions about him and get answers from somebody who really knew him. I have as passionate a love for the truth as I have for Jim, and that is why I do answer all the questions; it's the only way our truth can break into the light, and if I have to single-handedly change the mind of every last person on the planet about Jim Morrison then by God I will. Sure, it's big fun for you to ask and obsess and speculate about Jim. But then you can go home to the person you love and think no more about it. I can't do that, that's not an option I have, and your speculations and questions and obsessions are not fun for me. It's not a game for me. It's my LIFE. And what you think of as cool rock&roll history, I live with every day in pain. And it hurts too much to merely live it, let alone to be pulled back to it again and again, activating it over and over. Many of you--too many--don't seem to understand that. To you he's just Jim Morrison Rock God, and you're dying to hear all about him from someone who was close to him, and you ask and ask and ask. But to me this man you obsess about is not `Jim Morrison' but Jim my beloved dead husband, whom I love more than life and longer than time, whom I mourn endlessly and miss hourly, whose death is an unhealing wound I will bear until the moment of my own. You people didn't even know him, yet you publicly obsess about him and sorrow for his loss, and you don't think that is at all unusual; why then do you think that my loss is somehow less significant--I who knew Jim and loved him, and whom Jim loved--why do you dismiss my grief, or snipe at me for still grieving for him, still thinking of him, sneering that I haven't gotten on with my life? Well, big news for you, you little toads, I HAVE gotten on with my life; and a very nice life it is too, much, much more than most people ever get to have--a life that is filled with joy and dear friends and fame and spirituality and honor and interest and creative accomplishment (and jewelry!). It's the life I have always wanted, MY life on MY terms: only having Jim in it could make it better--and even him I had, for as long as we were both allowed. If I've taken him with me up the years, in love and fidelity, in what he and I both consider an ongoing relationship in which death is not the end, beautiful friends, what the hell business is it of yours? If I never wanted anyone else after Jim, who are you to dare suggest I should? Would you have? I don't think so! Pain is often the price of memory, and I decided long ago that I could afford it. It wasn't even a choice: there was never the least doubt in the world that I would want to remember no matter the cost. Sure, it hurts; sure, it's hard to do. But I earned it. It's mine and no one else's. It brings me great joy--the only joy I want, the only man I want--and it always has, and it always will. And since the pain is mine, and the love is mine, and the loss is mine, I will be the one to decide, thank you very much, how I shall speak of my husband: what I say of him, when I say it, how much I say, how often I say it, to whom I say it. You have no stake in my life or in Jim's life or in our life together, his and mine. You have no say in the matter now, as you didn't have one then. And it is neither your personal prerogative nor your moral imperative nor your Constitutional right to tell me how I should or should not choose to conduct myself. It is your job to honor and respect my choice, as I would yours. I am well aware of the depth of the interest and curiosity and concern, believe me, and I am SO proud for my beautiful Jim, that people who never knew him are after all these years still so interested in him and his work; and, by extension, to a vastly lesser degree, even in me and my own. But either way, I can't fill the hunger you have. Only you can do that. Jim himself couldn't do it...and we see what it did to him to try. No more. This was very, very difficult for me to write. As much as I can, I stay as far away as possible from Jim fandom, because, to me, Jim is real. I know him as a man and as a person, as my beloved and as my husband; the loss is real, the grief is real. Also I have a creative life of my own, as well as an ongoing life with Jim on a level I don't expect you to believe or even to understand--and that's real too. But I am unspeakably weary of being unfairly stigmatized as the Yoko Ono of the Doors (and, again, I can only imagine how Yoko herself must feel), and every now and again I feel the need to clarify my case, for those of you out there who might actually have an open mind...or any mind at all. I did not take Jim away from his "true love" Pamela; he came to me, of his own free choice and will and desire. I am not the "other woman"; I am the only woman Jim ever married--he called me his wife, and he should know. I am not a homewrecker; there was no home to wreck. I did not destroy Jim and Pam's "idyllic" relationship; they did that themselves, and anyway it was nothing of the sort. I did not evilly insinuate myself into Jim's life; he invited me in joyfully, with open arms and all his heart. I have not exaggerated or inflated my importance in Jim's life; on the contrary, I kept it private and modest for over two decades, until I could do so no longer. And I am no liar. In any case, Jim himself is the only one who can rightly judge of my importance to him--and his judgment on me was the name of `wife'. If you think he did not mean that when he said it, that you know better than he did how he felt about me or why he would choose to lie about something so sacred, then you are dismissing his choice and scorning the one marriage he ever chose to make, choosing to ignore the plain evidence of the verdict and decision of his own mind. More than that, you are saying he was a despicable liar and the cruelest, most evil rat bastard who ever lived. Jim wasn't like that--as you and I both know. And--as Jim and I both know--I absolutely do not deserve the hatred and the hostility and the malignant malevolent spite sent my way over the past seven years, or indeed the twenty years before. I wrote a book about Jim Morrison that makes him wondrously real, that restores to him what has been thieved away by the soul vampires and the psychic leeches: his joyfulness and dignity and humanity, his tenderness and gallantry, his courage and beauty and warmth and wit. I have given all of you who say you care about him a matchless and unparalleled gift. I have done better for and by Jim than anyone else who has ever written about him. I have been unceasingly loyal and utterly faithful to him from the day we first became lovers. I have kept the vows I made to him. I have told only the truth. I have never stopped loving him, and protecting him, and defending him, and I have given endlessly to him when others have done nothing but take. What the hell have I done wrong?